I'm using MinimServer with BubbleUPNP, but - for convenience - I use MusicBee whenever I'm listening to music at my PC. The changes I do in the tags at the PC are synchronized regularly to the NAS that runs the MinimServer.

Today I discovered that I have a lot of songs showing "unknown" as the year and decade. The files' tags "year" and "origyear" are properly populated, as far as I can tell, and they used to work properly. It seems (I checked a couple of files) that whenever I change the rating in MusicBee then MinimServer can't read the tags for "year" and "origyear" any more. MusicBee writes the tag "POPULARIMETER" with, e.g., "MusicBee|118|0".

Simon, can you explain this behaviour, and do you know a workaround? If you need more information or a file, please let me know.

If this is the file you uploaded, the date information in this file cannot be read by MinimServer because it is encoded incorrectly.

This file is encoded in ID3v2.3 format. It contains TDRC (Recording time) and TDOR (Original release time) frames, both set to the value 1999. These frames are valid for ID3v2.4 only. If your tagging program is writing these frames to an ID3v2.3 file, this is a bug in the tagging program.

Thank you for your research, with the help I have found the source of the error: I use MP3tag for almost all tagging purposes and the tags are saved in ID3v2.4 format. Music Bee, however, was set to saving in ID3v2.3 format, so when the rating for a title is changed in Music Bee then the format is changed thus producing the errors. I changed the settings in Music Bee and now everything shows correctly.

ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 are different in many ways and (as you have discovered) an ID3v2.4 file cannot be converted to ID3v2.3 (or vice versa) just by changing the version number in the header.

Also, saving a file without changing the date means that MinimServer might not pick up the changes you have made to the file when it does a rescan. To identify a changed file, MinimServer looks at the file length and the "last modified" date. If both of these are the same as when the file was last scanned, MinimServer does not rescan the file. To be sure that the file is always rescanned after changes, you should configure MusicBee to change the file date when it saves the file.